News From the Red Desert (39 page)

Then a man was tapping him on the shoulder, asking for popcorn. Rami Issay looked around for Mohammed, but the boy was not there. He could not see him anywhere. Perhaps he gone to use the washroom. So Rami Issay stood and filled up a bag and took the man's money. He motioned to Amr to come help but Amr would not acknowledge him. He looked for Fazil, but Fazil's seat was empty.

This irritated Rami Issay, whose instinct was to avoid getting into the nitty-gritty of anything ever. But after he had served a couple more bags of popcorn, he found that he enjoyed it. One hungry young man
after another stepped up and said, “Extra-large, please,” and held out a five-dollar bill. Rami Issay knew that the popcorn was costing him about twenty cents a bag. The butter, or rather margarine, was a nickel more.

He forgot about Mohammed's absence, and Fazil's, and Amr's failure to notice his summoning. He got the hang of filling the bags with a couple of quick scoops and taking the proffered money with a smile.

Amr also looked around for Mohammed, concerned about the impression the film might be making on him. He was no longer at the popcorn table. He scanned the margins of the crowd but could not see him. He looked over his shoulder for some reason and then he saw him at the back, near the Jordanians. What was he doing there? The man guarding the rifles was staring at the movie screen, transfixed, ignoring the boy.

Rami Issay was filling popcorn bags as fast they appeared in front of him. He was like a popcorn dispensing automaton. Then he couldn't hear a thing because a helicopter was winding up its rotor, thump, thump, thump, from somewhere near the airfield, and where was Mohammed, anyway?

Then he realized that was no helicopter. That sounded like an AK but on the screen Jamie Foxx was only talking to one of his underlings.

No, it was an AK, and it was very loud. He looked around the field. The AK was in little Mohammed's hands, and he was firing in short, aimed bursts at the crowd.

The first person to realize what was happening was Amr. He leapt to his feet and over the row of chairs, running at the boy roaring, “No!” Mohammed saw the figure emerging from the gloom and shot Amr through his forehead, shot his protector and his fellow chess player and his consolation. Amr died in the gravel, with an exit wound in the back of his head the size of a baseball. Just Amachai realized what was happening, too, and she stood as well, and waved her arms noiselessly at Mohammed, who was not thinking anymore, just firing, and Just Amachai fell, too, with a bullet in her chest and another three in her abdomen.

Anakopoulus did not understand what was unfolding around him, but he was on his feet. In standing, he drew fire to him, a bullet striking his left shoulder, and spinning him around. Directly in front of
him, Deirdre O'Malley heard a bullet whistle past her ear and then another shattered both forearms. One-fifth of a second later a third was en route toward her forehead, but at the same time Anakopoulus was falling. And in falling, he was hit in the chest by the bullet that had been meant for Deirdre's head. She saw his body shake as he was hit and then she dropped to the ground, bullets whistling just like they had in the ambush she had been in with the Canadians. It took her a moment to understand that the bones in her forearms and hands had been shattered.

These were unprepared, unarmed and unarmoured men and women, in the night, with a bright screen in front of them blinding them to the source of the gunfire. And as they collectively realized they were being fired upon, they rose and began running randomly, tripping over people on the ground, falling on them, and being fallen on in their turn. As men stepped on bodies in the dark, the sound of bones breaking could be heard amid the shots and among the screaming.

Mohammed continued firing. One of his bullets struck the projector and set it spinning and falling, its bulb extinguished in a great burst of sparks.

Sara Miller pulled Burnett with her through the crowd and they ran off into the night. Rami Issay saw them escape, and noted it with relief. He walked around the popcorn table and, no longer able to discern Mohammed, held his arms up as he approached the muzzle flashes that marked the boy's position. With the next burst, he thought,
Oh, that was close.
And then felt his shoulder being spun around and wondered who'd grabbed him, and then he smelled his own blood rushing out down his arm and he fell, too.

Of the people who had slid off their chairs to the ground after Mohammed began shooting, many carried pistols. Most of those remained pressed into the soil just as tightly as they could get themselves, but there were a few, MPs and infanteers, who lifted their heads and scanned for the source of the gunfire. Mohammed had emptied the magazine of his rifle before anyone could react in the bedlam. And then came the moment when he had to change magazines.

He apparently knew how to do this, but in the fear and excitement of the moment he found it difficult to remove the old magazine and when he finally did, it was all he could do get a new one into the weapon and to chamber a round. In that silence, eight pistols were raised but with the projector extinguished nothing could be seen of the shooter. That would have been the moment when Mohammed might have tried to slip away and perhaps he could have and perhaps he would not have been identified as the shooter.

This was not the fate he had chosen. Instead, he held the rifle to his shoulder awkwardly and fired a fresh stream of rounds through the frightened people on the ground. And then the eight pistols fired almost as one at his muzzle flashes. And again and again until they were all empty and then there was no more shooting at all.

And little Mohammed Hashto lay on the ground, punctured in a dozen places, as he had punctured so many others. He took a breath, and it hurt, because his ribs had been broken by the pistol bullets. And then he coughed. Bright, foaming blood poured out of his lips. He wished his mother were there. He missed her embrace, wished she could stroke his forehead and make him feel less frightened. And then he died.

J
ust Amachai was carried to the hospital on a stretcher by two medAs. She was unconscious when the IVs were inserted into both arms. Then, as the bags of blood that were hung over her stretcher began filling her arms, she roused. She was not certain what had happened to her. She saw light, and heard noise—there was a lot of it. She felt the fear of the nurses and doctors in the hospital, who did not know exactly what had happened either, but understood that there was a shooter, a green-on-blue attack of some sort. It sounded like it was close, was all they knew, but they had to focus on the patients in front of them.

Someone cut off her clothing with a pair of industrial-looking scissors. She was too frightened to be ashamed at her nakedness in front of these strangers. She thought then of little Mohammed. She felt that she bore the responsibility for his rampage, and she felt terrible about that. She had not seen what had happened to him, and that hurt, too.

A woman in a bloody smock who seemed to be in charge turned her attention to Just Amachai's abdomen. She looked at the three holes in her belly and clucked her tongue. She smeared some cold gel onto her skin and put an ultrasound probe on it. She looked over at a screen out of Just Amachai's field of vision. She put the probe down. The other women
said something about the patient's blood pressure. For the first time, she met Just Amachai's eyes. “Do you speak English?”

Just Amachai nodded.

“You are very badly hurt. We need to operate on you.”

Just Amachai nodded again. And then she felt her stretcher being wheeled backwards. She entered a room with bright lights. A man in a bright blue gown attached a syringe to her IV fluid. He injected something that made her taste metal and then the world darkened. As the light went away, she thought about Thailand, and the way the birds start singing there an hour before dawn, so loudly you would want to throw stones at them, if they weren't so pretty.

After Just Amachai came a flood of wounded soldiers—Americans, Canadians, Jordanians and Brits. Some were already dead, others died in the bedlam of the triage station, and others were staring open-eyed all around them, fully conscious and aware that they were dying, trying to make sense of this moment, trying to understand what this death meant and what their life had meant, but knowing only that it had been much too short. They died or were stabilized and taken to an operating room.

Rami Issay waited in one corner, with his arm in a reddening sling, dozing from the shot of morphine he had been given. Deirdre O'Malley was brought in, conscious and stable. She had extremity trauma only and was left on a stretcher beside Rami Issay. When Anakopoulus was carried in, clutching the side of his chest, Deirdre sat up, certain that he had saved her from being shot in the head. His clothes were cut away by the same person who had stripped Just Amachai, and Deirdre looked over at him, terrified that he might die, having blocked the bullet meant for her, certain that the act had been deliberate.

Anakopoulus's chest sprayed bloody foam in and out with each of the big man's laboured breaths. The nurse took his blood pressure and waved the Dutch surgeon over and told him the blood pressure and showed him the wound. The Dutch surgeon put in a chest tube and she and the nurse moved Anakopoulus to the operating theatre next to the one Just Amachai was in.

Her abdomen was a mess. Two of the three bullets had gone through bowel and had spilled feces throughout the peritoneal cavity. The surgeon washed out the abdomen and performed a colostomy and a small bowel repair. But as she studied her surgical field, she saw venous blood upwelling from behind the liver. The third bullet had gone through the liver and hit the hepatic vein. It's a terrible place to have a major injury. You can move bowel aside, you can take a pregnant uterus right outside the abdomen, and a patient can survive entirely without a bladder or a kidney or a spleen. But the posterior aspect of the liver is shielded from the surgeon by the liver itself, which can't be moved the same way. She tried the Pringle manoeuvre, which involves clamping the hepatic artery and portal vein. The anaesthetists had long since activated the walking blood bank, and fresh whole blood was being run into the operating rooms by the psychiatrists, whose usual work would come later. But it did not stop Just Amachai's bleeding for the simple reason that there was a 7.62-mm hole in one of the largest veins in her body. No clot could cover it.

And Just Amachai, thirty-four years old, slipped away in that operating room. Four thousand miles from her little boy, two years after she last held him.

Deirdre was brought in next, and the orthopaedic surgeon looked at the X-rays of her arms, and told her he thought she'd recover most of her function. In battlefield orthopaedic surgery, the complex business of inserting plates and screwing in medullary rods is generally foregone, because the risk of infection is high. External fixations, consisting of bone pins that attach to a framework of steel rods to immobilize the broken fragments, are preferred. These devices remain in place until the wounded are evacuated to Ramstein, or the Walter Reed, where the plating and rodding are performed. Elaborate wire-and-rod cages were constructed around Deirdre's arms as she slept on the bed Just Amachai had died on. And when the external fixations were complete, she was woken. She was aware of the pain in her arms being gone. And she asked about Anakopoulus. But no one there knew whom she meant.

In the operating room next door, Anakopoulus was being roused. His shoulder wounds had been soft tissue only. The bullet tracks were irrigated and cleaned. The bullets themselves, too deep to justify exploration, were left in.

The chest wound was also an uncomplicated repair. The bullet had contused some lung that looked viable—other than that, he was uninjured. Which is not the normal outcome when one is shot three times by an AK-47 at fifty yards. The surgeon told him as much, but he was too confused to understand the point being made. He retched, and then he retched again when he was brought to the recovery room. And then he fell asleep.

When he woke again he was on a stretcher across from Deirdre O'Malley's. As his eyes opened and his vision cleared he saw her, lying on her back, her arms encased in wire cages, and staring at him.

“I know what you did,” she said.

“Do you?” he asked.

“Yes. You should not have done that.”

He did not reply.

“I'm going to write about it.”

“Please don't.”

“I have to. The world has to know what you did.”

“Can you please wait? Until I get over this surgery, at least?”

“Okay. I'll call you in a month.”

“How will you get hold of me?”

“The military will put me in touch. They'll want this story out there.”

“I doubt it.”

“Oh, they will.”

And he turned away from her to face the wall. From his weeping, Deirdre thought his pain was poorly controlled. She motioned to the nurse with her head. The nurse brought some more morphine and soon he was asleep again.

When Rami Issay awoke, a military policeman was talking to the surgeon who had operated on him. The surgeon turned to look at Rami Issay
with lip-curling disdain. He said something more to the policeman and nodded. The nurse sat Rami Issay up, and then the military policeman put his hands behind his back and handcuffed him, wrenching his wounded shoulder badly. “What is happening?” Rami Issay asked in alarm. “Can someone call Major Horner?”

No one responded.

The nurse took out his IV. He was helped off his stretcher, and then walked to the door of the hospital. Outside, a Humvee was waiting. He was put in the back seat.

“Where am I being taken?” he asked.

He got no answer.

Rami Issay looked out at the camp from the back of the truck. Whatever time it was, it was not yet dawn, but the place was as active as an anthill under attack. Trucks and jeeps roared around the roads. Floodlamps had been erected around the shooting site, his café, which swarmed with soldiers. There were so many helicopters in the air, with searchlights probing, that it was not possible to speak and nearly impossible to see. In the SF compound, he was removed from the truck. General Lattice—second-place finisher in Issay's chess tournament two weeks earlier—stood talking to an officer. The officer pointed to Issay and Lattice nodded. Issay tried to smile at him. A hood was put over his head.